The Pommy drug smuggler. Madrid, Spain. 1982

When I left Morocco in 1982 I went by ferry from Tangiers to Algerceris in Spain. Whilst on the ferry, I met an Englishman who I hit it off with immediately, and is often the case when one is traveling; we decided to travel onwards together.

The Englishman wasn’t the only other fellow traveller I met, and soon there was a group of us guys who spent the evening exchanging horror stories about Morocco. After talking with those guys it was obvious that most of them had gone to Morocco to smoke hash. I could just tell by their talk and bloodshot eyes, that some of them were carrying drugs and it wouldn’t have surprised me if some of them were thinking about smuggling dope into Spain. I may have done a lot of dumb things in my life, but smuggling drugs is not one of them and I wanted to keep it that way. So I made sure that I checked my luggage before I got off the boat just in case somebody had decided to use me as a courier.

After disembarking the ferry at Algerceris, my newfound English friend and I caught the train to Madrid. When we first got on the train, there were plenty of seats and we could stretch out and get a little bit of sleep, but of course that sort of situation never lasts. During the middle of the night, hundreds of soldiers on leave got onto the train and of course we all had to sit up and nobody was getting any comfortable sleep. To make sure that nobody fell asleep sitting up, the soldiers drank and partied all night. It was during this uncomfortable time that my traveling companion told me that he had smuggled a condom full of hash oil into Spain by swallowing it.

Just before dawn, as I was starting to nod off, my new friend disappeared to the toilet to pass his contraband. It doesn’t bear thinking about how he sorted it all out in a train lavatory (I can remember thinking at the time that his fingernails were rather dirty), but he came back to his seat with a big smile on his face. His joy was short lived and his mood quickly turned to irritation, as there was now a sleeping soldier lying across his seat. So he walked up to the soldiers face, turned around, and let loose a ripper fart into the guy’s sleeping face.

I just couldn’t believe the sheer crazy audacity of the Pom’s action, and in a shot, the Spaniard was up and had his hands around the Englishman’s throat whilst screaming invective at him in Spanish.

There was going to be blood!

The hullabaloo of course attracted other soldiers, and I was sure we were both about to be beaten to a pulp by a mob. While the Spanish soldier was throttling my stupid friend, I was frantically trying to calm the situation down. As the choking English lad’s face was turning a bright red, he struggled vainly to get free and in the meantime the soldier’s comrades, advanced shaking their fists and baying for blood.

Amazingly, with my broken Spanish, I was able to eventually get everyone to calm down by convincing the soldiers that my friend was a complete idiot and that he was very sorry. The soldier let go of the Englishman, shoving down him into one of the seats and with a threatening gesture, left with his friends.

Whew! That was soooo close.

When we got to Madrid, the English guy offered to let me share his tent at a campground. The tent was a tiny little mountaineering tent called a “Force 10”, but at least it enabled us to stay in Madrid cheaply.

One of the first things we did after we got the tent setup was to go off to the nearest bodega and buy the cheapest wine we could get our hands on. We took some empty wine bottles and got them filled up for $.50 each. Strangely enough, I can say this without a doubt, it was absolutely the worst wine that I have ever drunk in my whole life. It was like drinking hydrochloric acid, and in the morning I had a very bad case of gastric reflux and a killer hangover.

Also, smoking something that had come out of a guy’s backside is a very weird thing to do.

I remember falling asleep on a train berth that held 8 people in Portugal and waking up to 12 people getting their tickets punched. (2 were sleeping up in the baggage racks and one woman was holding twins.
The 2 people in the luggage rack even scared the ticket punching guy.

“Butt hash”! That’s just too weird, especially when petrol is so cheap.

Pat

I don’t know about peacemaker, it was more like, “let me hold the Pom while you beat the crap out of the fool”. Honestly, I thought we were going to end up in hospital. Pissing off a group of guys is always a bad idea and doing the same to a large bunch of soldiers is suicidal.

Planetross

I’m usually so paranoid about being ripped off that I find it hard to sleep on trains that don’t have sleeper cars.

Butt hash and good shit… oh boy. You certainly had me laughing! You know, some of us in our older years are wise enough not to talk about some of the things we did back in “those were the days”. I’m still trying to work out how your friend sorted things out in the bathroom of the train. I’ll probably wake up thinking about that in the middle of the night. Dirty fingernails, indeed!

“I’m still trying to work out how your friend sorted things out in the bathroom of the train”. I imagine it was a pretty shitty business. I guess when you’ve spent time in a country where it’s normal to wipe your butt with your bare hand, pulling a condom out of a turd wouldn’t be that big a stretch.

Pomeroy

You’ve missed me? Where the heck have you been? Rumour has it you’ve slinking around on twitter or the such like.

Planetross

The Pommy guy was foolish alright, as many young guys are, but he was decent to me. Since we didn’t get beaten up I put the incident behind me. At least I got a story out of it.

Ha ha ha ha, this one made my day. I can imagine your eyes going wide open while observing your friend farting into the soldier’s face… Oh my…
And the good shit thing… Incredible, Razz, you are a star, definitely!
Are you writing this book of yours yet or what? You need to do it soon, mate, really!

On the Planetross’ note: I remember travelling with train in 80′ in Sudan with everybody, including me, just sleeping on the floor or wherever, since it was so crowded, and the ride went on for a number of days. The first night I woke up with somebody’s bare foot inside my mouth. Soon after I decided to continue my travel on the roof and spend the next four (or was it five..) days on the roof of the train. Which was where the real party was going on…
Oh, the crazy days…

Glad you liked it. You woke up with somebody’s foot in your mouth in Sudan?!! Ewwwww!!! I bet travelling on the roof of the carriages was great with the views as well but, gee, you wouldn’t want to roll over while you were sleeping at night.

I actually almost did a couple of times – roll over while sleeping, but luckily roof was full of people and there was always somebody awake, looking after the others, so it was a bit like a community. I still remember a young Sudanese bloke who woke me up when I was totally on the edge one morning…